Announcing Dashboard Theming in the Power BI Service

Today, I am thrilled to announce the availability of dashboard theming in the Power BI service. Power BI dashboards pull together reports, images, Excel workbooks, and more, to provide a 360-degree view of your organization in a single pane of glass. Now, you can quickly style your pane of glass to match a theme or your corporate branding with just a few clicks!

This feature is an extension to the existing report theming feature on Desktop. In addition to report visual colors, you will now be able to customize:

Dashboard background image (or even add an animated GIF!)

Dashboard background color

Tile background color

Tile font color

Tile opacity

Excited? Read on more details. Or, put on your Picasso hat and head directly to your favorite dashboard to start theming it on your own.

To get started, open a dashboard that you want to customize, and click on the “Dashboard theme” button in the ellipses at the top right.

Note: You will need to be an author of the dashboard to see this option.

In the dashboard pane that appears, you will see a drop-down with four choices: built-in themes (Light, Dark, Color-blind friendly) or a custom option. Selecting the built-in themes will automatically preview your existing dashboard with the selection. The colors chosen for these themes based on the theming standards and visual that provide the best contrast. The default and existing theme for Power BI is Light.

If you want to customize the colors or create your own theme, select custom in the drop-down. The pane should now populate with more options to configure the background, tiles, and fonts for the dashboard.

Note: If you want to add a background image, you need to specify an URL. We recommend that your image is at least 1920×1080 resolution to cater all the screen sizes of your viewers.

Lastly, if you prefer doing all this programmatically, you can upload a theme file using the Upload JSON theme button on top of the pane. A theme file is a JSON file that includes all the colors you want use for your dashboard. Most of you might be already familiar with the JSON file for report themes; this essentially mirrors that structure. Yes, you can use an existing JSON file that you have for reports and upload it to change the chart colors on the dashboard. If you need some inspiration, check out the theme gallery page in the Power BI Community to where you can find new themes that users have shared.

Tip: You can use the JSON file to share your dashboard theme with other authors or create a template for your organization.

The JSON file for dashboard theming includes:

name – The theme name (only required field)

foreground and background – Colors for the dashboard

dataColors – A list of hexcode to use for data in charts. You can choose to include as few or as many colors as you want

Like the built-in and custom options, when the theme is uploaded, the colors will automatically be applied to all tiles on the dashboard. Changing the colors of the report visuals on the dashboard will not affect the visuals in the report. Also, when you pin tiles from reports and choose destination theme, the dashboard theme will persist and override the report visual colors.

Current limitations: Dashboard themes are currently not supported when viewing the dashboard embedded using the REST API, on mobile devices, or by external users. We are working to light op these capabilities across all fronts soon.

Next steps

Head to your favorite dashboard and create your own theme

Have questions on the current feature, or the roadmap? Let us know in the community forums